I wanted an LCD monitor. I just painted my office and wanted an aesthetic upgrade - the old monitor was working fine, but my wife has a BenQ FP567s that looks very slick compared to my ViewSonic A90, a monitor I've never had a problem with but which was just seeming a little old. <p> My first attempt at replacing it was a Samsung <a href=http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=89%2C485%2C6989,6991&webid=572976&affixedcode=WW>SyncMaster 712N</a>, a great monitor, with 12ms refresh time, but which seemed a little small (17" compared to 18" measured viewable on the A90, advertised as a 19" monitor). So I took it back and replaced it with a 19" version, the Samsung <a href=http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=89%2C485%2C6989,6992&webid=572974&affixedcode=WW>SyncMaster 912N</a>. <p> Even though these two Samsung monitors share the same model number except for the digit which seems to indicate size, the 912N has 25ms refresh instead of 16ms refresh. I didn't think this would be a problem, and it might not have been with the Samsung, but I returned the 912N because it had a slight ghosting to the left of every letter. I thought it was a defective monitor, but another one at the store did the same thing. It's barely noticeable but I found it annoying, especially when reading text. The on-screen display (generated inside the monitor) didn't have the ghosting, so I guess it had to do with how it digitized the VGA signal coming in.. (I tried the various adjustments in the monitor, and I couldn't get it any better than the auto-sync did). <p> I replaced the 19" Samsung with a 19" BenQ, the <a href=http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=89%2C485%2C6989,6992&webid=570332&affixedcode=WW>FP951</a>. This monitor looked great, and played games that didn't have a very high framerate (like EverQuest 2, which runs at about 15fps on my computer) but playing DVDs or playing Counter-Strike looked terrible. So back it went. <p> Finally I've ended up with a BenQ <a href=http://www.staples.ca/ENG/Catalog/cat_sku.asp?CatIds=89%2C485%2C6989,6992&webid=588220&affixedcode=WW>FP937s</a>, a relatively new monitor. It's got a 12ms refresh so games look great, and every pixel seems perfectly clear. The only drawback to this monitor is the contrast is a little lower at 500:1 than the FP951 at 700:1. Believe it or not this is noticeable - when you're playing a DVD especially where you can see a lot of the black area around a widescreen movie isn't completely black. But this is a tradeoff I'm ok with. <p> A couple of other notes: <ul> <li>The BenQ monitors came with both DVI and VGA cables. The others came with only VGA. <li>The BenQ FP951 is the only one with an external power supply; the rest of them you plug right into the wall <li>The BenQ FP931 had one bad pixel, a green one near the top; none of the others had any bad pixels. </ul> <p> All the monitor hyperlinks are to <a href=http://www.staples.ca>Staples</a>, because they let me keep returning the monitor until I got the one I liked. I make a point of buying expensive stuff from stores with good exchange / return policies. Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:17:07 GMT